You jest about the different time points, but in essence this is what the linked image has basically done. The data from Germany is from 1981-1990 using ground data, while the data from the US is from 1998-2005 using satellite data in a modeled extrapolation.

Not that I would intuitively think Germany actually gets more sunlight than the U.S., but when a scientist (such as myself) says I used a model to extrapolate something, or normalized to conditions, it basically means I performed transformative maths to make the data look good enough to get grant money so I can get tenure because my stats program shot out more asterisks at me, all while being as obtusely transparent about it as I need to be to feel a sufficient amount of moral ambiguity.

Not to nipick but nobody substitued the word "Germany" for "US", the grandparent substituted "US" for "Germany". It was quite the opposite of what you say makes you feel queasy actually so I guess you are feeling really good right about now.

I know "US getting less sun than US" means "US getting less sunlight than US", but I still feel a little bit queasy when people substitute the word "Sun" for "Sunlight"

Maybe that's just me...

So, when people use the phrase, "fun in the sun", do you correct them with, "fun in the warmth and light of the Sun"? Do you tell people, "No, you are not getting some sun. You are receiving some sunlight!"

If only you had been around to prevent the Beatles from making fools of themselves by singing, "Here Comes the Sun", instead of, "Here Comes More Direct Sunlight".

Or maybe you are just a little too caught up in misplaced pedantry to notice the usage of the word "sun" has a common and accepted usage to denote the light or warmth of the sun.

I was stationed in Wiesbaden, (West) Germany back in the '80s; I got there on July 4 (how appropriate) and the weather was nice & sunny. Along about the 10th, it started getting cloudy...and I didn't see the sun until midway through the following April! I live in the Phoenix Metro area; I have my own opinions as to where I would rather build a solar energy plant.

I don't care if you're a democrat or republican, that's extremely poor handling of our money.

Maybe, but what it really shows is that we are not spending enough. This technology is not cheap. A few million here and there is just a drop in the bucket. We as a planet (not nation) need to get off our collective asses and get serious about the future prospects of the human race. Of course a cheaper solution would be to limit population growth, but that argument is not going anywhere.

Actually the problem is we are not spending it in the right places. The US in particular needs to be more like Europe and spend money on improving houses and appliances, as well as building a smart grid. That policy is too socialist for US tastes so all the money gets thrown at a small number of companies.

It is actually much, much cheaper to save 2000MW of consumption than to build a new power station to supply it. It increases quality of life too, and we get cool new stuff. Insulate houses, start installing a smart grid, fit some solar panels, upgrade appliances to be smarter. The problem is that looks like socialism, with the government paying to improve people's homes and gear. Well, it is, but ultimately the government will have to either subsidize new power plants that mostly benefit their owners or it can spend your tax money directly on you so that you get all the benefit.

In the UK we partially got around this by forcing energy companies to spend a certain percentage of their profits upgrading people's homes for free. That way the government isn't doing it, they are just forcing energy companies to do it for them. Not socialist at all.

"Back to the video, the REAL point that was being made was that billions of YOUR tax dollars have been flushed down failed companies who have far more talent in kicking back their government investments rather than actually producing energy."

I might believe that Fox cared about that if they had been as vigorously opposed to the multi-billion dollar fiasco that was the Iraq war, which included just as much corruption via-a-vis Hallibuton, et. al.

"Back to the video, the REAL point that was being made was that billions of YOUR tax dollars have been flushed down failed companies who have far more talent in kicking back their government investments rather than actually producing energy."

I might believe that Fox cared about that if they had been as vigorously opposed to the multi-billion dollar fiasco that was the Iraq war, which included just as much corruption via-a-vis Hallibuton, et. al.

I'd believe it if they rallied against the 10-54 billion (depending on how you count) subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies, who rake in trillions in profits. Half-billion to a failed solar company is bad, but not as bad as 10+ billion to already established, ridiculously-profitable industries.

I love how this seems to work. One company failed (Solyndra). And it was allowed to fail, not propped up endlessly (which I think is how this stuff should work). The poster was all for using government subsidy to jump start a newish industry. But now that ONE company failed, it magically gets extended to all of them, and it's government fraud, and we should stop everything.

One company fails = "As for direct investment into "Green" companies the government shouldn't be trusted on that ever again."

A few points:

I highly doubt ANY governement subsidies are provided without fraud. This is no different. That being said, The Solyndra deal WAS hinky and someone should get in trouble.

THAT being said, YES Solyndra was not in good financial order. We don't subsidize companies that DON'T need help. We subsidize industries that DO need help. That's kind of the point.

Solyndra made solar panels, not energy.

The Chinese are subsidizing the ever loving crud out of their panel industry. It's impossible for anyone(including the germans) to compete with that. That's kind of why we SHOULD be subsidizing our own solar companies.

Personally, I was all for government subsidizing of the clean energy industry to get that ball rolling. That was until Solyndra. It wasn't that it failed mind you. It was the fact that $500,000,000 in loan guarantees from the government were coming back to the very same politicians who were providing those guarantees!

Protip: You shouldn't be singling out clean energy or Solyndra for this.

I wonder how many actually bothered to watch the video. That statement was stupid, of course, but it was just an added "fact" that really doesn't change the tone of the report that solar energy subsidies have resulted in very little output. We are throwing money away at failed companies.

I'm all for solar energy. But I'm not for throwing our money away. My thought: who is being held accountable for the money, and overseeing that it goes into productive use?

If this is their "expert" on solar energy, it's a serious blow to Fox's nonexistent credibility. If they can't be bothered to bring on experts who, at the very least, are going to dance around the real issue factually to make a case for the conservative standpoint, they need to get off the air.

But you've hit on the fundamental issue. If you just wait around for things to "get cheaper on their own" you wait a lot longer. One could argue that China has waited a bit too long for electric vehicles and over their densest cities they have "air you can chew." For the commuter vehicles for which they worked, electric cars in the US did not break even on the cost of electrics on the year the Volt was introduced. The $7,500 tax credit made them break even. Once they were justifiable to the consumer they sold like mad. This in turn causes the cost of manufacturing to drop and means that by the time the next generation of batteries hits, there will have been two generations of Volt working out all the bugs. If we get a 50 mile electric range out of the next gen (as opposed to 35 today), this will actually double the people for whom this technology is viable, if by then the cost of manufacturing the Volt had gone down 10% we might not need the subsidy to sell out of all the Volts GM can produce in a year.

Even with the subsidy, my commute didn't fall into the break even range. I bought one anyway because I thought it was the right thing to do.

So, I must disagree. We'll have better electrics on the road ~3 years sooner due to that "evil government subsidy." That was money well spent.

As for centralized solar, there are lots of viable-sounding technologies for making that work, the sooner we try 10 of them on a large scale, the sooner we find the clear winner. Paying for the 9 runners up, is part of that cost. If you can do this sort of science and have all your test results come out positive each time, you aren't actually doing science.

And there in lies the issue. I think electric cars are great little toys at the moment and there are areas where they are a great alternative to the ones powered by internal combustion engines but the added cost needs to come down a lot for there to be a large uptake of them in the places where they do well. My wife and I have looked into getting an electric vehicle to replace her car when it is time as she drive about 5 miles a day. With the abuse that her current car gets from this type of driving an elec

There are a LOT of people that don't drive more that 25 miles 95% of the time. These people tend to live in areas where pollution from cars is a very big problem, so uptake of this kind of vehicle is supportable.

Don't let seeking a perfect solution get in the way of doing something better than what we have now.

Would you call the war in a subsidy? I would. And trillions are spent there. So if 0.1% of energy is produced by subsidising to the tune of billions, but the rest by subsidies of trillions... The orders of magnitude kinda balance out.

The problem is that in the cost for fossil fuels, the cost for the damage it does is not taken into account. Granted it is very hard to determine those cost, but usually people that point out that solar energy is not cost effective ignore the cost that we do have, but is not paid via the energy bill

Even then, if you cover California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas you have a population that's probably a bit larger (than Germany), and much more sunlight, where it would make sense for the investment in research just to cover this area... Let alone grid feeds to neighboring states, and combined with water pipelines, excess generation can be stored as Hydrogen.

They mentioned briefly that the US tried to subsidize solar but the Chinese kept undercutting our manufacturers and we just couldn't beat their prices. What is Germany doing differently that allows them to beat Chinese prices? Tariffs? Import restrictions? Why does that kind of market manipulation work for Germany and why do we allow subsidies to happen in the states but not that sort of competition restriction?

Oh, right, they have more sun... which still doesn't answer how their solar products compete with the Chinese. I like how they named dropped 'natgas' several times because the US has so much of it! No problems worth mentioning about natural gas!

They mentioned briefly that the US tried to subsidize solar but the Chinese kept undercutting our manufacturers and we just couldn't beat their prices. What is Germany doing differently that allows them to beat Chinese prices? Tariffs? Import restrictions? Why does that kind of market manipulation work for Germany and why do we allow subsidies to happen in the states but not that sort of competition restriction?
Oh, right, they have more sun... which still doesn't answer how their solar products compete with the Chinese. I like how they named dropped 'natgas' several times because the US has so much of it! No problems worth mentioning about natural gas!

The only explanation is that China must get more sun than anyone else in the World.

In the past a large fraction of all solar cells was produced in Germany, but that was mostly because the production chains were set up and improved earlier than in other countries. Nowadays the German solar industry has the same problems as the American. And the reaction of the government is just to cut the subsidies, by quickly lowering the guaranteed prices for power from solar cells. Still, that hurts the German companies more than the Chinese, since the Chinese have lower costs due to lower wages and newer production plants.

You left out another major factor, the Chinese don't have to worry about environmetal issues. Want to dump all the dirty water you made when you etched those panels? China says find your nearest river and have at.

That's a short term advantage though. The smog problem in Beijing is bad enough that people are starting to demand environmental protection. The autocratic government won't be quick to change, but you can't hold back that much public pressure forever.

What Germany is doing differently is subsidies. For many years, you could get a feed-in tariff of as much as EUR 0.65/kWh for providing solar electricity to the grid. Every sheep farmer in the country was covering his fields with PV. And, if you raised the panels up, you could still graze sheep because enough sunlight got around them to grow grass. The price of PV worldwide skyrocketed, leading to huge growth in production. That production bubble is now working its way through the marketplace and the price of PV panels has come from $4/W to under $1/W.

What Germany has that we don't is a strong enough environmental movement to provide political backbone to those who want to spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize solar.

Um German here. Actually the Chinese are undercutting us. Our solar panel industry has moved out of country, gone bankrupt or is close to the brink of going bankrupt. The part of the industry not building panels is fine though.

Whether that is a bad thing I can't say. Prices are very good now and they keep getting better. If the goal would have been local manufacture...well...that failed, if it was spreading solar power and making it viable it was a great success.

As opposed to keeping little projects like the F-35, SeaWolf, various carrier proposals and that giant money sink that is the Pentagon going?

This stuff isn't even a rounding error on the Pentagon's budget. Yes, we need a strong military and yes, we are not getting the best bang for the buck here. Plenty of room for real budget savings so we can do things like do R&D on solar.

Also regarding ACORN, there was a criminal investigation which resulted in no charges being brought against them or any findings of wrongdoing on their part.

And as part of that same investigation they got Breightbart to hand over the unedited video which showed them applying for the housing subsidy wearing a suit/tie and acting normal, and another doing the whole Pimp/Ho routine which was denied. They just edited out the denial and spliced in the approval for the first one.

Funny how you guys don't realize that you are BOTH right, and that the ENTIRE US media is complete and utter shit. There are alternatives to being R or D, but Americans for some reason think that they have to be one or the other, even though both have largely the same policies, with just a few differences on wedge issues to keep the people at each other's throats so they don't realize that they are being hosed big time.

Name one Marxist mainstream media outlet. I will wait. We have several center right ones, but no marxist news outlets are anything near mainstream in the USA. The Militant is not mainstream and I am not sure it even qualifies as Marxist, socialist yes but they do not limit themselves only to Marxism for their writers.

Nuclear is actually about as socialist as you can get, the loans for them are always government backed, they are highly controlled by the government and even insured by it. There is no more socialist form of power in the USA than nuclear.

The feds have been trying to get industry to start up nucs. They have billions in loan guarantees and other support packages. But it still takes so much up front money to get a nuc plant on line that the industry is passing. You can actually build out solar / wind for less.

For fission power to actually do something in the US, you have to do two things - figure out a long term waste storage system and make smaller, modular reactors that have some sensible price point. The former is basically a political football, the latter an engineering problem that seems to be mostly solved.

Notwithstanding that this doesn't even sound remotely plausible. Anyone with just a basic idea of geography knows that Germany is on a much higher latitude, where the sun doesn't shine as brightly as on lower latitudes.

But then I guess that to some those deserts in southern US are best known for their dark, overcast winter days, and Germany is best known for their scorching hot summers.

Fox is part of a class of media outlets that tells its audience what it believes it wants to hear. That's it. It's not about fact checking or anything like that, it's about knowing that its audience would actually stop watching it if it changed direction and concentrated more on telling them what Fox believes is true, rather than what the audience thinks is true.

On that note, someone is bound to mention MSNBC, but MSNBC isn't really watched by anyone. MSNBC's mistake, FWIW, is that it's trying to do the same thing as Fox but for a different audience, but doesn't realize that liberals, by and large, don't "want to hear" things they "agree with" if they can't be backed up with facts (plus I don't believe NBC actually has any idea what a diverse bunch liberals actually are in practice.)

I'm embarassed to say that I've worked for at least one media outlet (not going to say which, thankfully most Slashdotters have probably never heard of it) that tries to do the same thing though publishing a variety of different magazines. The "liberal" products did badly, the "tea party" products did well. I leave it to the reader to determine why.

On that note, someone is bound to mention MSNBC, but MSNBC isn't really watched by anyone.

We watch MSNBC every day. Saturdays and Sundays are the best with "Up with Chris Hayes" and the Melissa Harris Perry show. Rachel Maddow is a must during the week. These people are policy wonks and are not afraid to admit when they're wrong. The research is deep and strong.

And before the rightie nut jobs start blathering about MSNBC being "liberal", keep in mind that Joe Scarborough is on in the morning spewing his ridiculousness and the bride of Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell is on soon after that. MSNBC is a business and they don't like people being "too" liberal, like Cjenk Uger who was asked to tone it down or leave.

Despite this being loaded with wording signifying it ai a political rant, I watched the video and it doesn't seem to say what the article says. In the video, the question was asked about why it works for Germany and not the US, the answer was, it's the sun it doesn't work as well on a cloudy day, it works well in California and not so good in the north east.

That is not an incorrect statement even though it skips the entire question of why it different in Germany.

During the early part of the Iraq war, Even before that, During the Clinton Administration we had belief that Iraq had a Mass pile of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The idea that wasn't the case seemed just naive at the time. That and combined with a fit of hyper-patriotism after 9/11, made both sides a bit hawkish, as well as any media bias.

What changed was the war still wen't on, and we found were no WMD, the threat was just so Iraq would look tough to Iran. The 9/11 never forget was soon put aside with normal daily issues. Then the economy stared to pop.

Most of the political disagreement from the left came from the far left the Anti-Bush conspiracies were just as baseless as the Anti-Obama ones are now.

It does when both sides are so polarized and angry with each other. All the while we the sheeple keep believing whatever spews from either sides mouth. Both sides have their agenda, and both agendas suck in their own way.

I'm wondering how this is news for nerds? All news organizations repeat filtered facts, chock full of slanted opinion, with the purpose of keeping viewers to sell ad time. They all have become more entertainment then news.

Of course, Germany and Denmark have strong green constituencies who support those policies, but there are realpolitik concerns at work too. A few years back Russia shut down the natural gas pipeline that ran through the Ukraine to Germany and central Europe because they wanted to play politics with the Ukrainians. Natural gas prices spiked in Europe overnight and put a serious crimp in its economy. The Germans, Danes, and many others got the wake up call and have been driving toward energy independence hard.

There are longer term benefits for those economies who move their energy base off fossil fuels: predictable energy costs. In economic terms, when you increase the predictability and stability of key inputs businesses can better plan and grow, in the same way that low inflation means businesses can better know what their borrowing costs and real revenues will be.

So, fox news has turned into a joke over the years, and the worst of it is the morning show. The hosts are idiots, they do little research and make a lot of false claims. BUT... watched the video. The quote was taken completely out of context. She said "Germany has a lot more sun than us. You could do solar power in places like California and out west, but on the east cost here it's just not going to work well." That's a far cry from what Slates claiming. It's still probably wrong, but it's not nearly as idiotic as Slates claiming and it was clearly an off the cuff remark and not a statement of fact. The real direction the interview was taking was that China is undercutting our solar panel production, and the only way to compete is with subsidies. Which is true. Also, she went on to say our money would be better invested in developing cleaner methods of using Natural Gas, which is also true. My own opinion is that, we're going to use that natural gas, period, it's a fact. So lets make sure we at least use it in as clean a way as possible.

There are plenty of reasons to talk shit about Fox news. This single comment is not news worthy.

As an experiment, I just went to the Huffington Post to see if I could find any bad science on a site that leans towards the left. One headline reads "Scientists Say ETs May Be Much Closer To Us Than We Ever Before Thought". Going to the article shows that the only reference to life was added by the editors and half of it makes no sense (ET phoning home is closer than people think? Really? How close do people think it is? And I thought ET phoned a nearby ship, not his home planet, anyway) and even the article itself is woefully inaccurate; the comments themselves point out that "at a habitable distance and size" doesn't mean Earth-like, especially since planets orbiting close to red dwarfs would be tidally locked. (The astronomer used the phrase "potentially Earth-like", which is a nice way of saying "only a few of them are going to be Earth-like".)

This was the first scientifically-related article I found on the first left-wing site I picked. It may not be as dramatic an error as saying that the US has less sun than Germany, but I wonder how big a mistake I would have found had I tried for a month or two or however long it took to find the Fox News error.

The media and political commentators are horrible at science. Nothing to do with Fox News specifically, as the Slashdot headline and the absence of articles about other sites tend to imply.

I have to agree: The problem really has nothing to do with Fox news. It has to do with the entire profession of journalism. With very few exceptions, journalists have zero grasp of issues relating to science, engineering or technology. Too often, their idea of research is to talk to their equally clueless colleagues in the lunchroom. Alternatively, they just make up "facts" that sound right to them.

The entire profession is spiraling towards the drain. With the rise of the Internet, fewer people are willing to pay for news of any sort. Less income, budgets are cut, fewer journalists have to churn out more material, quality goes in the crapper, so even fewer people are willing to pay for news...

Just look at the quality of coverage on scientific/technical issues like nuclear power, health care, climate change. Find some specific bit of information, any factoid that seems fairly unique, and start searching. Most likely you will find a lovely merry-go-round: journalists copying from journalists copying from journalists. If you manage to find the original source of the factoid, likely as not it has been taken totally out of context and/or has been completely misunderstood.

Alternatively the entire article may be basically a copy of a press release. Companies and governmental organizations know the journalists are under time pressure, so they provide pre-written "articles" that can be used directly, no thinking required.